“Little wolf girl, you found me,” she said, and it was the same voice Alys had heard in Oldgate. “It is so good that you found me.”
“I’m not a wolf. I don’t know who you are,” Alys said.
“I’m called Andomaka, among other things,” the woman said. She stepped forward and put her hand on Alys’s shoulder, looking deep into her eyes as she did. Had Alys wanted to kill this woman, it would have been simple. The knife was in her hand, the woman’s unprotected side exposed to her. The scarred man restrained himself, but his discomfort was in the angle of his shoulders and the deepness of his scowl.
“I’m Alys. Darro was my brother.”
“Come, Alys,” Andomaka said. “Let’s sit together.”
Alys settled on the bench. The light of the one candle glimmered in the other woman’s eyes.
“How much did your brother tell you about our work?” Andomaka asked.
“Nothing,” Alys said, and the word came out plaintive. “He didn’t tell me anything.”
“That’s because of me. I asked him to hold what we did in silence. That he did so only means he treated me with honor. Don’t think less of him because he was loyal to me.”
Alys felt something shift. She tried to see the pale woman as if she were Darro. Could he have been in love with her? How deep had his loyalty to her run? Had she given him the gold coins?
“Why did he die?”
For the first time, something like distress entered the woman’s expression. She folded her hands together on the table, leaning forward like she and Alys were at a taproom together and she wanted their conversation to be only between the two of them.
“There is a lie at the heart of Kithamar,” Andomaka said. “There was a great injustice, and those who were meant to protect the order of the city have abandoned it. There are silent wars on these streets that the small and safe know nothing of.”
“Don’t know who the safe are. And there are some scraps in Longhill you haven’t heard of either,” Alys said. It was an idiotic remark, born of fear and powerlessness. The smoke woman—Andomaka—was kind enough to ignore it.
“I am niece to the prince that died and cousin, we say, to Byrn a Sal, who has taken his place. There was more to that than it seemed, and there are prices to be paid for what happened. My friends and I have bent ourselves to serving the true powers of the city. In this, your brother was my eyes and ears. And, when the need came, my hands. When a thing needed doing, I could go to him, and it would be done.”
“Darro was… fighting for Kithamar?”
The scarred man’s voice was like a thing from another world. It startled Alys to remember that he was in the room at all. “We paid him. Let’s not make this something it wasn’t.”
“He helped me,” Andomaka said. “And I helped him in return. He fell when he was working in my name. To bring me the blade that was stolen, that you’ve brought. Since he fell, I have had to rely on others who I trust less, and whose hearts I do not know. But you’ve come, and I wonder if that was not fated.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Andomaka took her hand. The pale eyes looked deep into hers. In the candlelight, they seemed almost colorless. “I think he sent you to me. I think you have come to take up his work. And to finish it. I do not know who killed him, only that it was an enemy of mine and of his. Come to me. Take his place at my side. We will find justice together.”
“You… You want me to…”
The scarred man answered. “When we need work done, you do it as he did. We pay you as we paid him. And yes, it will take you and us against the same people that he went against. You have your chance to finish the ones that finished him.”
“I didn’t get him killed, then,” Alys said. “It wasn’t my fault?”
“It wasn’t your fault that he died,” Andomaka said. “Is it your work to avenge him?”
Alys couldn’t put any name to the storm in her chest and her throat. All she knew was that it shook her. She nodded.
“One of his last tasks,” the scarred man said, “was to bring us that blade. He didn’t manage it.”
“He did,” Alys said, sliding the silver knife across the table and letting it go.
Andomaka put her hand on the hilt. “Thank you,” she said.
“Of course she’s going to say she’s on the side of light and rightness,” Sammish said. “No one comes in saying that they’re a scheming bitch with plans to set the city on fire and charge for the sand to put it out. I can’t believe you gave it to her.”
The harvest festival was still going on around them, but the rush of energy from earlier in the night was gone. The lights still glowed in their lanterns, and music still played on the streets. The homes and guild houses stood open, but there were fewer people coming to take hospitality from them. The riverside was too crowded. The streets stank of half-eaten food and spilled wine. A pack of dogs feasting on the scraps eyed them warily as they passed. The moon had set, and the night air had taken on a deeper chill that spoke of the winter to come.
“I don’t know why you’re upset,” Alys said. “This is a good thing. This is going to help us.”
“Help us with what? Is there still something to help with?”
“Of course there is,” Alys said, turning south. “We still don’t know who killed Darro. That’s what this was all about.”
“We know it wasn’t anything to do with you or me or Orrel. He was on a pull of his own, and it went bad somehow. That doesn’t mean there’s anything to pick up.”
They walked in silence for a few long blocks. Sammish made small sounds like she was still chiding Alys, but under her breath. She was tempted to stop and demand that Sammish say whatever it was aloud, but she also didn’t want to hear it. Instead, she walked, and she nursed her anger. Alys felt like something was gnawing at her breastbone from the inside. The pressure and the pain were better than whatever was underneath them. She tried not to think about that.
Andomaka and the scarred man—his name was Tregarro, it turned out—had thanked her for the blade, given her a few silver coins to mark the beginning of their new arrangement, and a black candle with a dark wick that she could use to speak to them as Darro had. Then Tregarro had taken her back to the celebrations in Green Hill where a group of young men, nude apart from masks that obscured their faces, were running a drunken race down one of the larger streets. Revelers in costume stood at the sidelines, shouting and cheering as they passed.
She hadn’t seen Sammish. She hadn’t even thought to look for her. When her friend appeared at her side as if she had never left, the relief in her eyes left Alys guilty, and when Sammish took her arm and said Are you all right? Alys hadn’t known how to answer.
She’d told Sammish everything that had happened as they made their way back across the river. By the time she was done, her next steps had already become clear to her. She led them back the long dark way across the city to Longhill with a plan in mind.
The houseman who ran the building where Darro had kept his little room was known to Alys as he was to anyone. The land the building stood on was claimed by a merchant family in Riverport, but the buildings on it were run by Kennat Water. He was a thick-bodied man, quick to anger, and he knew that Longhill viewed him as halfway between traitor and petty noble, taking their money to the wealthy quarters from which it would not return and with the power to choose who slept in shelter and who took their chances in the street. At least as far as the buildings he controlled.